title: Canada's health promotion survey as a milestone in public health research.
abstract: This commentary describes the contribution of the 1985 Canadian National Health Promotion Survey to the development of public health research and policy-making in Canada and argues that on the basis of that contribution, it should be considered to be a public health research milestone. In terms of research, among its contributions which subsequently have been adopted in other survey studies were: going beyond risk factors to operationalize concepts implicit in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion; empowering users to participate in knowledge translation, sharing and transfer; ensuring sufficient sample sizes for each jurisdiction to be able to confidently generalize to its population; establishing a model as well as questions for subsequent health surveys; encouraging widespread use of data through making them available early; and developing and using an explicit social marketing strategy to reach target audiences, including the general public. With regard to policy-making, among its contributions which have been adopted were: using survey data to develop and enhance healthy public policy initiatives; encouraging researchers to work with policy-makers in developing policies; using survey data to contribute to the evaluation of public health initiatives; engaging policy-makers in the development of surveys; and encouraging the use of survey data for advocacy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Gerontology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC. irootman@telus.net
authors.forename: Irving
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Rootman
authors.forename: Reg
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Warren
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Catlin
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D002170:Canada; D015438:Health Behavior; D006293:Health Promotion; D054624:Health Status Disparities; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D011634:Public Health; D012923:Social Class